Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Learning to be here

I am lying on my back on a rather prickly carpet in a large, light meeting room with tall windows overlooking a garden, chairs shuffled back against the walls and a haphazard floor-covering of recumbent bodies laid out like the crazy spokes of a wheel. It is 7.30 on a week-day evening after a long and tiring day at work. Lying here, my body HURTS. As the group leader talks us through a forty-minute Body Scan exercise, I become more and more aware of the pain and discomfort in my belly, in my head. As tension and resistance ebb away, I realise I feel just... WRECKED, vibrating with tender, aching pain. I've probably felt like this all day, I think, and been pushing it down with a mixture of rigidity, will-power and pain-killers. Self-pity washes over me, emotions aching fiercely along with the body. Forty minutes is a long time to lie still and feel like this, and retain the intention to listen and move my attention around my body. I scream inwardly with the need to sit up, rock and hug myself, but I don't do it. Amazingly, by the time we finish the Body Scan, get up and return to our chairs, I feel much better. The soaring, shrieking ache has largely abated. This is Session One of an eight-week course in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.

My very first memories, of when I was about three years old, are of pretending: I’m not here. Surrounded by toys I didn’t want to put away and faced by a raging parent, screaming in painful, impotent frustration and unable to calm myself, never learning how to tackle the task, but instead shutting down, going inside myself. Refusing reality: not here, not this, in my head, someone else entirely. Always in my head, my favourite pastime curling up with a book to read and a sweet to suck, soothing the senses, allowing the mind to escape, leaving this place, this body. The furious teacher who bawled me out in front of the whole class of eight-year-olds for ignoring her in the street – but I wasn’t there, I was miles away!

To possess imagination, to love to read, to be able to visit other worlds is a rich gift. But if early life feels difficult and no one guides you to ‘hold’ and calm yourself, to feel that it’s okay, escaping can take over and you grow up – as I did - unable really to be here much at all. Result: a life spent refusing to engage, unfulfilled and often isolated.This was the phenomenon that psychotherapy never touched. In several years of therapy I learned a lot about what made me who I am, why I was so fucked up, this particular kind of fucked up. I was glad to know. Understanding why was helpful. But it didn’t change anything, didn’t change the way I felt.The only thing that slowly began to change that, a long time later, long after I stopped hoping or looking for change, was meditation. So I am as huge a fan as it is possible to be. I have a hard time not nagging everyone I care for that they should, they must, they’d benefit so enormously...

I loved meditation first because I was very nervous, often very stressed out, and it made me calmer. I met those occasional states of sunny bliss that the 'beginner’s mind'may access. I remember one day on my first meditation course, a hot day and I had a dreadful cold, fever, stuffed up; I remember the clear feeling of my consciousness rising above it, breathing freely on another plane. But, though interesting, that’s not IT. IT is that meditation changed the way I felt from day to day – not who or what I was, but how I experienced that. All those patient - and sometimes impatient - breaths, one breath at a time, in daily sessions of sitting meditation were breaths on the glass that separated me from everything around. Glass – it can’t be glass, because it began, slowly, slowly, to bend and then sometimes, and more and more often, to seem thinner, more porous; sometimes even, almost, almost, it was not there at all.

I approached it completely without this expectation, but meditation changed me and continues to do so. It has changed me a tiny, tiny bit, eroded just a tiny bit the thin, invisible but inexorable barrier that was always there. Things look almost the same. But the difference between looking through a window and being outside is total.

It’s the scariest thing of all, when you’ve spent your whole life building this invisible barrier. And it’s the greatest blessing and relief. Suddenly there’s space. A whole world of space, replacing the tiny world of a three-year-old where I’d got stuck. Space changes everything. Instead of panicking, stuck in a lift, ultra-stressed by overwork and difficult relationships and pain and illness and my own inadequacies… there is space. It’s the difference, as an ancient Buddhist scripture tells, between a choking handful of salt in acup of water and the same handful of salt in a fresh-water lake. The salt, the fear and pain and tension, is no less, but its impact is much less. It feels, I feel, every now and then, so different. Even, sometimes, when things are really shit.

So, yes, I’m a very big fan of what my Buddhist meditation teachers have taught me. It’s by far the most important stuff I’ve met in life. Not surprising, then, that when I began to hear and read about the movement to teach mindfulness meditation, on a secularised form of the Buddhist model, in the mainstream health services, to people suffering from chronic stress, depression or pain, I was very interested.

What amazing, hopeful news! But no sooner it’s here, of course, than, even as we rejoice, those of us who’ve been learning the benefits of meditation slowly, deeply, over years, in a dedicated and sometimes austere Buddhist setting, begin to wonder whether these short intensive courses on the model developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn can really, even with the most stringent practice, be enough. This might be a wonderful and decisive development in mainstream healthcare. Or it might – especially if adopted mostly on grounds of lower cost than medication or long-term psychotherapy - be too little, too late, too unsupported by the medical profession as a whole and by the rest of society.

I wonder about that. I also wonder whether I would have benefited as much from meditation if I hadn’t already done the intellectual work of self-exploration in psychotherapy. But if MBSR and MBCT are the real deal, not to be fatally diluted, then surely, in light of my own experience, I must get involved? Surely there is nothing I find more important? Cynical now about so much I once believed in, about meditation as a force for change I am not cynical at all. Here I could put my heart – and perhaps the greater part of my efforts for the rest of my life.

Momentous thoughts, but let's be concrete and modest about this. So I've started this MBSR course as a first step, motivated by all of the above, but mostly by my own undoubted ongoing need for stress reduction, of which - having begun - I am all the more aware.

20 comments:

There's so much wonderful stuff here! I love what you say about "being here" vs. "not being here." I think some folks are frightened by Buddhist talk about "being here," thinking it will destroy (or force them to give up) the intricate imaginary worlds they've constructed. But I think the craft of fiction & the practice of imagination can only be helped by learning to live "in the moment": once you learn to notice what's HERE, then you can apply that same sort of astuteness to fictional worlds. But if imagination is a place of escape...well, then you end up having nowhere real to reside.

What a wonderful post - I found it inspirational. I've read Full Catastrophe Living and would love to do the mindfulness course that JKZ describes in its pages. I'm also a fan of meditation, although I do it in fits and starts these days and ought to take more time over it. I'd also love to know how you get on with the course.

This is very inward-looking stuff, mostly for myself, to remember what I was thinking. So I really appreciate anyone who's read to the end and commented.

Lorianne, I'm glad some of it resonated with you - and yes I've had people say exactly what you're describing.

Litlove, you have the wonderful John Teasdale in Cambridge - now that he's retired from academia, a teacher of Insight Meditation as well as of MBCT. I did a short meditation course with him in London recently. Don't know if he is currently teaching anywhere in Cambridge.

Jean, I am excited for you that you're taking the MBCT. I took it in 2003 and it has changed everything for me. The little sangha of fellow students we formed right after the class has met faithfully and this community of just three or four souls has kept meditation front and center.

What a fascinating read. I want to thank you because I think, in explaining about your three year old self, and about the going within with books etc., you have given me something to ponder that I had not been able to work out despite my own years of therapy which, as you say, are helpful but still not quite enough to break through the barrier. It has also given me something to think about in terms of my 6 year old son who, I suspect, is going much the same way for much the same reasons.

Jean, I appreciate very much that you write with such honesty and insight about your own experience of this course and meditation in general. I always feel that your impression is trustworthy because it really is your own and open-eyed, not concealing your doubts and difficulties, along with the praise. It will be fadcinating to read what you make of the rest of the course. By the way, it was also an MBSR weekend workshop that I took a friend to on the Isle of Wight a few months ago, taught by someone who was taught by Kabat-Zinn, who, in serendipitous chain of cause & effect, I first saw on a YouTube video because you had mentioned him in an earlier blogpost.

It's such a particular pleasure when something so very introspective seems to resonate with others.

Leslee, yes it's not cheap. My course cost £300 (US$600)for 8 x 2-hour sessions plus one whole day, which was hard for me to scrape together (thence the moans elsewhere about all the extra work I'm doing). It's not expensive 'for what it is', as they say, given the time, expertise and resources involved in running the course. But it's certainly still a privilege out of the reach of many. It will be wonderful if the whole thing becomes available through the health service in due course.

Just checked - that's what they're charging here, too, which is expensive enough but not out of the question. I looked at it some years ago and recall it was well over $1000 (US), unless I'm mistaken. Maybe they've adjusted the price to make it more available. Or else I'm losing my marbles, which is also possible. ;-)